Segregation In Letter From Birmingham Jail

In the early 1960’s, African American people were dealing with many forms of subjugation and restriction by the white majority at the time. They faced hate speech and actions such as lynching outbreaks. The racist white population was determined to ensure the segregation between their community and those who once were a tool to them, and they had that ability when the Supreme Court decided “separate facilities for the races were constitutional so long as they were of an “equal” standard” (Kirk, 2004).
All these restrictions were centered around preventing equality and, therefore, restricting freedom. Thurgood Marshall argued that the notion of separate educational facilities was inherently “unequal” in that it instilled an inferiority complex …show more content…
One of the most notorious of those being Martin Luther King Jr., a notorious advocate for the civil liberties and equality of African American communities. After facing prejudice such as being sent to jail for protesting without a permit and writing his infamous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, watching his fellow activists tormented through the freedom rides, and seeing the active attempts to prevent blacks from entering educational facilities such as in the case of James Meredith, he delivered one of his most iconic and passion fueled speeches, “I Have a Dream”, at the March on Washington, an event advocating for civil and economic rights of people of color specifically through the passing of the Civil Rights Act. ("Timeline: The Civil Rights Era") Over 200,000 people attended the event and heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s influential speech in person, not to mention the millions that heard it through the media outlets of the …show more content…
I conducted my research by going through a rhetorical analysis of his speech to find what points he wanted to emphasize and who those points were directed to. What I found was that Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for the social, political, and economic equality of African Americans by involving different audiences such as blacks, allies, legislators, and opponents to black freedom whom he knew would hear the speech either in person or through the media to join him in his dream of a better America. He hoped to see a world: where people of all races can have an equal opportunity to voice their opinions in politics, political equality, where people of all races would be payed the same for the same work, economic equality, and that the economic and political equalities would manifest into people of all races having the same opportunity to succeed and thrive, social equality. I then found how each equality discussed intersected with the audience he addressed to understand why he discussed his concerns with each of those specific communities. This tied into the overarching goal of attaining freedom for African Americans as when there is equality, no one majority can have control or dominance over a minority and therefore is a freedom to follow whatever path one may